Anent Adventure... Sometime in the early 1970s, (maybe 74 or 75) a DEC CE friend, Debbie, gave me a 9 track tape on a small 7" reel and said "You've got to try this one". I asked her what system it was for, and she said "PDP-10.
Well, I knew nothing about PDP-10 systems, but I said I'd have a look at the tape. Mind you, most of my tape library was 7-track. When I first dumped it on a CDC CYBER 73 system, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It slowly became clear that this was a 36 bit system and that characters were 7 bits in length, with the highest-order bit not part of the 5 characters. So I wrote out some code and discovered that the characters were indeed 7 bit ASCII. After that, it was a simple matter of converting the thing to 6 bit CDC display code. Naturally, the I/O statements had to be reworked for SCOPE / INTERCOM, and the different word length but a special problem arose when it came to saving the game. Unlike the DEC convention of saving an executable file, it really didn't fit well with the SCOPE OS architecture to do that. So I took all of the volatile game-related variables and wrote them out as a file. Retrieving a saved game was pretty simple. I anonymously put the game onto a reel of tape and made it known that it was available to whomever wanted it. It was only about 2 weeks that CDC COMSOURCE launched a search-and-destroy mission to wipe the game off the face of the earth, or at least CDC SVLOPS. I don't know if they ever succeeded. I decided that this was something that I would best not take credit for. Your tax dollars at work. >From all reports, it was extremely popular. --Chuck
